


This Rusted Metal Box

by crickets



Series: Naked & Bruised [1]
Category: Lost
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-05-06
Updated: 2007-05-06
Packaged: 2017-10-02 06:03:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crickets/pseuds/crickets
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Claire is alone and driving across the United States in a used pickup truck.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Rusted Metal Box

She doesn’t like to drive off the highway. It isn’t because the second-hand pickup gets crappy city mileage. It’s something else. There are too many back roads, too many signs, too many people living the same empty lives.

Some nights, washing off the dust of the day, Claire can’t figure out whether she envies them or pities them in all of their self-centered sameness. Most nights though, she just stops _trying_ to figure it out.

She just drives, always moving, tracing her way through the landscape without a destination. There isn’t anything to go towards, not anymore. But the longer she stands still, the harder it becomes to forget, to forget the man, to forget her blood, to forget the family she lost before she ever really had it, to forget the child that she never wanted in the first place.

After the rescue, the farther inland she got, the more trapped she felt. So many nights spent by the sea, she used to think that _that_ was what it meant to be trapped. _No escape._ But somehow, somewhere along the way, something changed.

Borders became a comfort.

The vastness of this new country is what scares her now, makes her feel like she is drowning, sinking, dissolving into the world. So maybe she keeps going just to prove to herself that there is indeed a beginning and an end. Or maybe it’s the questions that follow her. Maybe that’s what she’s running from, the pity, the looks that say, _you poor thing_, the knowledge that the only people who could ever truly _know_ what it was like are now long dead.

She stole things.

She never told anybody, but even from the beginning, the night before they read the passenger manifest, she started taking little things – a shoelace, a piece of ribbon, torn out pages from their journals, guitar strings, good luck charms, water-logged and dusty, wedding rings, strips of clothing covered in sand, just little souvenirs, memoirs of the dead. Someone should keep a record, even if she couldn’t remember all of their faces, didn’t know all of their names, there should be something left behind. They _were_ people. They _had_ lived.

_And they had died._

When Sawyer was killed, she found him nude, his body broken, and there was simply nothing left to take. He was the last. She had pulled a strip of bark from a tree by where he lay, wrote his name on it, and kept that. She carries these things with her now, and they all fit into a sad, small, rusted metal box. She keeps it underneath the passenger seat of the truck.

And that is the thing she’s running from. It’s life, the fact that she lived, and the fact that they died.

And that? _That_ is the thing she can never drive far enough or long enough to escape.


End file.
